Snooker

For some reason a few years ago, I started to watch snooker on YouTube.  This is a game developed by the British in India and transported back home.

David, my gracious host, played snooker as a young man and his father was a pretty good player.  We've had a conversation about the sport a couple of times.  Take a look at it and look for Ronnie O'Sullivan.  Perhaps the greatest natural player who ever took to the felt.


David arranged with Carl, son in law, to have a game at the NCI, North Chesterton Institute, a working man's club.

David and I sped off to the north of Cambridge to pick up Carl and some golf clubs - more on that another time.

The NCI is actually in Chesterton, but I couldn't see that it wasn't in the north of Cambridge.

We parked on a road by the river Cam and then walked a couple of blocks up a hill to find the club.

The club was founded in 1895, in a working man's neighborhood.

Time marches along as we of some aged span will note and the time from 1895 to the present is considerable.  There are not a lot of the working men around and the neighborhood is a bit upscale.  I wonder what it looked like 1895?  These are tall homes, set close to the side walk, of brick.

We went in and signed up.

Have you ever seen The Color of Money, a film with Paul Newman and who ever it was, his name will return in a minute?  But there are scenes in the movie where Paul, who reprises his role of Fast Eddy Felson, see The Hustler, takes the kids around to his old haunts and, well, some of them have turned into furniture dumps, some are still at play.  The ones in play are timeless and have the patina of great age, with the promise that they will never change.

The NCI is like that.  It's old and a bit tired.  But it promises to be there.

Alas, as mentioned, the working men are a bit scarce and there were not a lot of folks there.  We borrowed cues (not cue sticks!) from the pool room to take up stairs to the snooker room.

The room is not too high ceilinged, but there are 4 snooker tables awaiting.  The two closest to the door are covered with cloths and the two at the end of the room are busy with the NCI snooker team, rumored to be practicing for a match.  They were serious as no banter was heard the entire time we were up there.

The beer is cheap at the club, but we had to pay a small fee to play at all.  It was sad to find that to light the table for ten minutes cost 50 P!  Yipes.  this is about 75 cents for us from the states.  Hold this thought as I get to the game...

The tables are 6 feet wide by...  12 feet long!  They contain the usual 6 pockets, in the usual places, but, as one wag suggested, why do they make the pockets smaller than the balls?  Ok, so now we must imagine people with little skill and bad eyes and stiff backs and necks trying to line up balls across a 10 foot span and then trying to hit it "a quarter ball on the inside!"  This soon became a game of hit and hope.  In fact on a couple of occasions the cue ball didn't get much of a hit either.  The balls are smaller than pool balls in the US.

The Carl suggested billiards.  This is not the billiards we have in the states, but played with one red ball and two cue balls.  The idea is to carom across them and potting the balls is not to one's advantage - usually!  It seems there are about 15 ways to score.  Carl rattled them off a couple of times, but they slipped through the memory filter.  This game predates snooker.  It was quite interesting and a lot less challenging than the snooker.  Oh, we didn't score much better, but we could get closer.

With our skill level we were putting more 50 pence coins in the light meter than balls in the pockets.  Sad, but true.

I mentioned that time marches on and the club building and a couple of other houses the club owns are worth in the area of $8 million, per Carl.  The club can continue with a mortgage or two as long as they want, but at some time, the club is doomed with its lack of players.

It was getting late and we only had the one beer.  We racked the cues and covered the table and said farewell to an ancient institution.

I'm finishing this up on Sunday morning.  We spent Saturday in Ely, which has a large church, called a cathedral, with enclosed buttresses and stained glass and the scars of fallen towers.  I'll fill that visit in on the next post.

Our trip is nearing its end.  A few more days to go.  But there should be a couple more posts of points of interest.